Monday 20 December 2010

Blimey

From one of those best books of the year lists:

4. Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl explores ideas of authorship and collaboration through the act of translation. Hawkey didn’t know German when he began translating Georg Trakl’s poems, and so he integrated creative techniques like using using an online translation program, shooting the text with a 12 gauge and translating the perforated page, and leaving pages exposed to the elements for a year before translating what remained. In doing so, Hawkey physically represents (and augments) the inherent degradation of the original text that occurs in translation. Ventrakl is as much a book of poetry as it is a meditation on how the identities of the author and translator merge. The result is haunting and beautiful.

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